Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

ANTIQUITIES

THERE WAS, OF COURSE, Sir Geoffrey said, the Inconstancy Plague in Cheshire. Short-lived, but a phenomenon I don’t think we can quite discount.

It was quite late at the Travellers’ Club, and Sir Geoffrey and I had been discussing (as we seemed often to do in those years of the Empire’s greatest, yet somehow most tenuous, extent) some anomalous irruptions of the foreign and the odd into the home island’s quiet life—small, unlooked-for effects which those centuries of adventure and acquisition had had on an essentially stay-at-home race. At least that was my thought. I was quite young.

It’s no good your saying ‘of course’ in that offhand tone, I said, attempting to catch the eye of Barnett, whom I felt as much as saw passing through the crepuscular haze of the smoking room. I’ve no idea what the Inconstancy Plague was.

From within his evening dress Sir Geoffrey drew out a cigar case, which faintly resembled a row of cigars, as a mummy case resembles the human form within. He offered me one, and we lit them without haste; Sir Geoffrey started a small vortex in his brandy glass. I understood that these rituals were introductory—that, in other words, I would have my tale.

It was in the later eighties, Sir Geoffrey said. "I can’t remember now how I first came to hear of it, though I shouldn’t be surprised if it was some flippant note in Punch. I paid no attention at first; the ‘popular delusions and madness of crowds’ sort of thing. I’d returned not long before from Ceylon, and was utterly, blankly oppressed by the weather. It was just starting autumn when I came ashore, and I spent the next four months more or less behind closed doors. The rain! The fog! How could I have forgotten? And the oddest thing was that no one else seemed to pay the slightest attention. My man used to draw the drapes every morning and say in the most cheerful voice, ‘Another dismal wet one, eh, sir?’ and I would positively turn my face to the wall."

He seemed to sense that he had been diverted by personal memories, and drew on his cigar as though it were the font of recall.

"What brought it to notice was a seemingly ordinary murder case. A farmer’s wife in Winsford, married some decades, came one night into the Sheaf of Wheat, a public house, where her husband was lingering over a pint. From under her skirts she drew an old fowling piece. She made a remark which was later reported quite variously by the onlookers, and gave him both barrels. One misfired, but the other was quite sufficient. We learn that the husband, on seeing this about to happen, seemed to show neither surprise nor anguish, merely looking up and—well, awaiting his fate.

"At the inquest, the witnesses reported the murderess to have said, before she fired, ‘I’m doing this in the name of all the others.’ Or perhaps it was ‘I’m doing this, Sam [his name], to save the others.’ Or possibly, ‘I’ve got to do this, Sam, to save you from that other.’ The woman seemed to have gone quite mad. She gave the investigators an elaborate and horrifying story which they, unfortunately, didn’t take down, being able to make no sense of it. The rational gist of it was that she had shot her husband for flagrant infidelities which she could bear no longer. When the magistrate asked witnesses if they knew of such infidelities—these things, in a small community, being notoriously difficult to hide—the men, as a body, claimed that they did not. After the trial, however, the women had dark and unspecific hints to make, how they could say much if they would, and so on. The murderess was adjudged unfit to stand trial, and hanged herself in Bedlam not long after.

I don’t know how familiar you are with that oppressive part of the world. In those years farming was a difficult enterprise at best, isolating, stultifyingly boring, unremunerative. Hired men were heavy drinkers. Prices were depressed. The women aged quickly, what with continual childbirth added to a load of work at least equal to their menfolk’s. What I’m getting at is that it is, or was, a society the least of any conducive to adultery, amours, romance. And yet for some reason it appeared, after this murder pointed it up, so to speak, dramatically, that there was a veritable plague of inconstant husbands in northern Cheshire.

It’s difficult to imagine, I said, what evidence there could be of such a thing.

I had occasion to go to the county that autumn, just at the height of it all, Sir Geoffrey went on, caressing an ashtray with the tip of his cigar. I’d at last got a grip on myself and begun to accept invitations again. A fellow I’d known in Alexandria, a commercial agent who’d done spectacularly well for himself, asked me up for the shooting.

Odd place to go shooting.

Odd fellow. Arriviste, to speak frankly. The hospitality was lavish; the house was a red-brick Cheshire faux-Gothic affair, if you know what I mean, and the impression it gave of desolation and melancholy was remarkable. And there was no shooting; poured rain all weekend. One sat about leafing through novels or playing Cairo whist—which is what we called bridge in those days—and staring out the windows. One evening, at a loss for entertainment, our host—Watt was his name, and…

What was his name? I asked.

Exactly. He’d become a student of mesmerism, or hypnotism as he preferred to call it, and suggested we might have a bit of fun probing our dark underminds. We all declined, but Watt was insistent, and at last suborned a hearty local type, old squirearchical family, and—this is important—an inveterate, dirt-under-the-nails farmer. His conversation revolved, chiefly, around turnips.

Even his dark undermind’s?

Ah. Here we come to it. This gentleman’s wife was present at the gathering as well, and one couldn’t help noticing the hangdog air he maintained around her, the shifty eyes, the nervous start he gave when she spoke to him from behind, and also a certain dreaminess, an abstraction, that would fall on him at odd moments.

Worrying about his turnips, perhaps.

Sir Geoffrey quashed his cigar, rather reproachfully, as though it were my own flippancy. "The point is that this ruddy-faced, absolutely ordinary fellow was cheating on his wife. One read it as though it were written on his shirt front. His wife seemed quite as aware of it as any; her face was drawn tight as her reticule. She blanched when he agreed to go under, and tried to lead him away, but Watt insisted he be a sport, and at last she retired with a headache. I don’t know what the man was thinking of when he agreed; had a bit too much brandy, I expect. At any rate, the lamps were lowered and the usual apparatus got out, the spinning disc and so on. The squire, to Watt’s surprise, went under as though slain. We thought at first he had merely succumbed to the grape, but then Watt began to question him, and he to answer, languidly but clearly, name, age, and so on. I’ve no doubt Watt intended to have the man stand on his head, or turn his waistcoat back-to-front, or that sort of thing, but before any of that could begin, the man began to speak. To address someone. Someone female. Most extraordinary, the way he was transformed."

Sir Geoffrey, in the proper mood, shows a talent for mimicry and now he seemed to transform himself into the hypnotized squire. His eyes glazed and half-closed, his mouth went slack (though his mustache remained upright), and one hand was raised as though to ward off an importunate spirit.

"‘No,’ says he. ‘Leave me alone. Close those eyes—those eyes. Why? Why? Dress yourself, oh God…’ And here he seemed quite in torment. Watt should of course have awakened the poor fellow immediately, but he was fascinated, as I confess we all were.

"‘Who is it you speak to?’ Watt asked.

"‘She,’ says the squire. ‘The foreign woman. The clawed woman. The cat.’

"‘What is her name?’

"‘Bastet.’

"‘How did she come here?’

"At this question the squire seemed to pause. Then he gave three answers: ‘Through the earth. By default. On the John Deering.’ This last answer astonished Watt, since, as he told me later, the John Deering was a cargo ship he had often dealt with, which made a regular Alexandria–Liverpool run.

"‘Where do you see her?’ Watt asked.

‘In the sheaves of wheat.’

He meant the pub, I suppose, I put in.

I think not, Sir Geoffrey said darkly. He went on about the sheaves of wheat. He grew more animated, though it was more difficult to understand his words. He began to make sounds—well, how shall I put it? His breathing became stertorous, his movements…

I think I see.

Well, you can’t, quite. Because it was one of the more remarkable things I have ever witnessed. The man was making physical love to someone he described as a cat, or a sheaf of wheat.

The name he spoke, I said, is an Egyptian one. A goddess associated with the cat.

Precisely. It was midway through this ritual that Watt at last found himself, and gave an awakening command. The fellow seemed dazed, and was quite drenched with sweat; his hand shook when he took out his pocket-handkerchief to mop his face. He looked at once guilty and pleased, like—like—

The cat who ate the canary.

You have a talent for simile. He looked around at the company, and asked shyly if he had embarrassed himself. I tell you, dear boy, we were hard-pressed to reassure him.

Unsummoned, Barnett materialized beside us with the air of one about to speak tragic and ineluctable prophecies. It is his usual face. He said only that it had begun to rain. I asked for a whiskey and soda. Sir Geoffrey seemed lost in thought during these transactions, and when he spoke again it was to muse: Odd, isn’t it, he said, how naturally one thinks of cats as female, though we know quite well that they are distributed between two sexes. As far as I know, it is the same the world over. Whenever, for instance, a cat in a tale is transformed into a human, it is invariably a woman.

The eyes, I said. The movements—that certain sinuosity.

The air of independence, Sir Geoffrey said. False, of course. One’s cat is quite dependent on one, though she seems not to think so.

The capacity for ease.

And spite.

To return to our plague, I said, I don’t see how a single madwoman and a hypnotized squire amount to one.

"Oh, that was by no means the end of it. Throughout that autumn there was, relatively speaking, a flurry of divorce actions and breach-of-promise suits. A suicide left a note: ‘I can’t have her, and I can’t live without her.’ More than one farmer’s wife, after years of dedication and many offspring, packed herself off to aged parents in Chester. And so on.

Monday morning after the squire’s humiliation I returned to town. As it happened, Monday was market day in the village and I was able to observe at first hand some effects of the plague. I saw husbands and wives sitting at far ends of wagon seats, unable to meet each other’s eyes. Sudden arguments flaring without reason over the vegetables. I saw tears. I saw over and over the same hangdog, evasive, guilty look I described in our squire.

Hardly conclusive.

There is one further piece of evidence. The Roman Church has never quite eased its grip in that part of the world. It seems that about this time a number of R.C. wives clubbed together and sent a petition to their bishop, saying that the region was in need of an exorcism. Specifically, that their husbands were being tormented by a succubus. Or succubi—whether it was one or many was impossible to tell.

I shouldn’t wonder.

What specially intrigued me, Sir Geoffrey went on, removing his eyeglass from between cheek and brow and polishing it absently, "is that in all this inconstancy only the men seemed to be accused; the women seemed solely aggrieved, rather than guilty, parties. Now if we take the squire’s words as evidence, and not merely ‘the stuff that dreams are made on,’ we have the picture of a foreign, apparently Egyptian, woman—or possibly women—embarking at Liverpool and moving unnoticed amid Cheshire, seeking whom she may devour and seducing yeomen in their barns amid the fruits of the harvest. The notion was so striking that I got in touch with a chap I know at Lloyd’s, and asked him about passenger lists for the John Deering over the last few years."

And?

"There were none. The ship had been in dry dock for two or three years previous. It had made one run, that spring, and then been mothballed. On that one run there were no passengers. The cargo from Alex consisted of the usual oil, dates, sago, rice, tobacco—and something called ‘antiquities.’ Since the nature of these was unspecified, the matter ended there. The Inconstancy Plague was short-lived; a letter from Watt the next spring made no mention of it, though he’d been avid for details—most of what I know comes from him and his gleanings of the Winsford Trumpet, or whatever it calls itself. I might never have come to any conclusion at all about the matter had it not been for a chance encounter in Cairo a year or so later.

"I was en route to the Sudan in the wake of the Khartoum disaster, and was bracing myself, so to speak, in the bar of Shepheard’s. I struck up a conversation with an archaeologist fellow just off a dig around Memphis, and the talk turned naturally to Egyptian mysteries. The thing that continually astonished him, he said, was the absolute thoroughness of the ancient Egyptian mind. Once having decided a thing was ritualistically necessary, they admitted of no deviation in carrying it out.

"He instanced cats. We know in what high esteem the Egyptians held cats. If held in high esteem, they must be mummified after death; and so they were. All of them, or nearly all. Carried to their tombs with the bereaved family weeping behind, put away with favorite toys and food for the afterlife journey. Not long ago, he said, some three hundred thousand mummified cats were uncovered at Beni Hasan. An entire cat necropolis, unviolated for centuries.

And then he told me something which gave me pause. More than pause. He said that, once uncovered, all those cats were disinterred and shipped to England. Every last one.

Good Lord. Why?

I have no idea. They were not, after all, the Elgin Marbles. This seemed to have been the response when they arrived at Liverpool, because not a single museum or collector of antiquities displayed the slightest interest. The whole lot had to be sold off to pay a rather large shipping bill.

Sold off? To whom, in God’s name?

To a Cheshire agricultural firm. Who proceeded to chop up the lot and resell it. To the local farmers, my dear boy. To use as fertilizer.

Sir Geoffrey swirled his nearly untouched brandy and stared deeply into it, watching the legs it made on the side of the glass, as though he read secrets there. Now the scientific mind may be able to believe, he said at last, that three hundred thousand cats, aeons old, wrapped lovingly in winding cloths and put to rest with spices and with spells, may be exhumed from a distant land—and from a distant past as well—and minced into the loam of Cheshire, and it will all have no result but grain. I am not certain. Not certain at all.

The smoking room of the Travellers’ Club was deserted now, except for the weary, unlaid ghost of Barnett. Above us on the wall the mounted heads of exotic animals were shadowed and nearly unnameable; one felt that they had just then thrust their coal-smoked and glass-eyed heads through the wall, seeking something, and that just the other side of the wall stood their vast and unimaginable bodies. Seeking what? The members, long dead as well, who had slain them and brought them to this?

You’ve been in Egypt, Sir Geoffrey said.

Briefly.

I have always thought that Egyptian women were among the world’s most beautiful.

Certainly their eyes are stunning. With the veil, of course, one sees little else.

I spoke specifically of those circumstances when they are without the veil. In all senses.

Yes.

Depilated, many of them. He spoke in a small, dreamy voice, as though he observed long-past scenes. A thing I have always found—intriguing. To say the least. He sighed deeply; he tugged down his waistcoat, preparatory to rising; he replaced his eyeglass. He was himself again. Do you suppose, he said, that such a thing as a cab could be found at this hour? Well, let us see.

By the way, I asked when we parted, whatever came of the wives’ petition for an exorcism?

I believe the bishop sent it on to Rome for consideration. The Vatican, you know, does not move hastily on these things. For all I know, it may still be pending.

HER BOUNTY TO THE DEAD

WHEN PHILLIPPA DERWENT at last got through the various switchboards and operators, and a young voice said Hello? in a remote, uncertain way, it was as though she had tracked some shy beast to its secret lair, and for a moment she wished she hadn’t embarked on this; she hated to be thought a busybody, and knew that sometimes she could act like one.

This is Phillippa Derwent, she said, and paused a moment. When there was no response, she said, Are you John Knowe? Amy Knowe was my…

Yes. Yes, of course. Aunt Phil. I’m sorry. It’s been so long….

It had indeed been long—over twenty years—years which, Phillippa knew, would have passed far more slowly for her nephew, aged eleven when she had last seen him, than for herself. A certain amount of constrained catching up was thus the next duty. Her nephew’s life, she had always supposed, had been filled with incident and probably not happy; her own, which seemed to her happy, hadn’t been eventful. Her sister Amy had married a man she hadn’t loved, for her son John’s sake, she said: they had left New England—the last Phillippa had seen of them—and begun a series of removes farther and farther west. Amy’s letters, not pleasant to read, had grown more and more infrequent, now reduced to a Christmas card with a distracted note written on the back. The stepfather had vanished; at any rate, he ceased to be mentioned. When their mother—with whom Phillippa had lived alone for many years—died, Amy hadn’t come to the funeral.

Somewhere down the years Amy had written that John had entered a seminary, and when Phillippa saw mentioned in her local paper that a John Knowe had been appointed to the faculty of a Catholic girls’ school in Westchester, the possibility that this might be her nephew, revolved eastward, grew slowly (for it was hard for her to think of him as other than a shy, large-eyed, and undergrown boy) to a certainty. For many reasons (mostly not the reasons she chose to give herself) she didn’t call him; but when the lawyer’s letter came informing her that Cousin Anne’s will had at last been straightened out, she took it on herself to inform John of it. Foolish, she told herself, living so near and not reopening relations; if he wouldn’t begin, she would.

She had some property in Vermont, she told him. Nothing very grand; but she’s left some of it to you, or rather you’ve come into it by default or something….

Not the old farm, he said, his voice far away.

Oh no. No, Mother and I sold the farm years ago. No, a parcel of land—not too far north of the farm—and I thought perhaps you might like to see it. I was planning a trip up there in any case—the leaves ought to be just at their peak—and I thought…

I don’t drive.

Well, I do. She was growing faintly impatient. There are apparently some papers to sign at her lawyer’s up there. It could all be taken care of.

Well, he said, it’s very kind of you. There was a pause, and then he said: I’m sorry about the farm.

Slight, darkly bearded, not in clerical dress, he stood on the steps of the college with an abstracted yet attentive air that struck her as familiar. Who was she reminded of? Of him, no doubt; him as a boy. For a while she studied him without getting out of the car or hailing him, feeling unaccountably swept into the past.

John.

Aunt Phil. He was as astonished as she was not. She felt embarrassed; she must appear a ghastly crone in comparison to his mental image. Yet he took her hand warmly, and after a moment’s hesitation, kissed her cheek, tenderly almost. His large eyes were as she remembered them. For a moment a hard thickness started in her throat, and she looked at the sky as an excuse to turn away.

I should warn you, she said, I’m a weather jinx. I can go anywhere and a blue sky will turn black. And in fact, in the west, hard, white clouds were moving over, preceded by wind-twisted pale mare’s tails—stormbringers, her mother always called them.

Parkways north: already along these most civilized of turnpikes the ivy had turned, burdening the still-green trees with garments of many colors. Since the twenties, when her father had bought the farm for their summers, she had made this journey many times, at first on dirt roads through then-rural Connecticut, later traveling under these arching bridges each one different, and now skating along superhighways that reached—it had once seemed impossible to her that they ever would—deeply into Vermont itself. At this season, she and Amy and their parents would have been traveling the other way, not toward but away from the farm, where they lived from May to October; going home, they always said, but to Phillippa at least it had always seemed the reverse: leaving the true home for the other, the workaday place, the exile.

We sold it in 1953, she said in answer to his question. The summer after you left this part of the world. It had become just a burden. Dad was dead, and you children weren’t coming up anymore; Mother and I needed money to buy the house in Rye. We got a sudden offer at the end of the summer—a pretty good one—and sold. We were grateful. I guess.

What was a pretty good offer then?

Five thousand. And another hundred or so for the furnishings; the buyer took most of those too.

Five thousand. He shook his head.

We paid two, in the twenties. And much of the acreage was gone by then.

Nineteen fifty-three, he said softly, as though the date were something precious and fragile; and then nothing more, looking out the window, absorbed.

She had rather feared this, his remoteness, a probably inevitable constraint. She passed a remark about the weather—the trees were turning up their silvery undersides, as though raising hands in dismay, and the sky was growing increasingly fierce—and then asked about his work. It seemed to be the right question; talking about theology, about the politics of the soul, he became animated and amusing, almost chatty.

Phillippa’s religion, or lack of it, was that of the woman in the Stevens poem, sitting on Sunday morning with her coffee and her cockatoo: Why should she give her bounty to the dead? And that about April…

There is not any haunt of prophecy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s bill, that has endured

As April’s green endures….

Yes, he said, putting the tips of his fingers together, heaven is a difficulty. It seems hardly worth all the effort to end up in a white robe singing praises; like an infinity of choir practice. Of course, there’s to be an ineffable, indescribable bliss; but it’s damn hard to imagine, isn’t it?

I suppose really religious people sense it, Phillippa said, feeling odd to be defending heaven.

I don’t know. I think people who really believe it invest the ordinary things they love with the idea of heaven; so that when they say ‘This is heavenly,’ they really mean it. Phillippa noticed his shapely hands, mobile now where they had been meekly folded before. They too reminded her of someone; yet how could so changeful a thing as hands, so markable by time, retain a reminder of him as a boy?

Mother—Amy—always said, he went on, that she didn’t care about heaven if she couldn’t have around her all the people and places and times she loved most, in their characters—I mean not abstracted; not in white robes; not on clouds. I think I believe that. Heaven is where you are—or will be, or have been, there being no time in heaven—most happy.

Where for her, Phillippa wondered; and knew, without assenting to the possibility: the farm, in high summer, years ago. If that were so…But it wasn’t. If there was one thing Phillippa knew, it was that happiness is something you lose, fast or slow. I wouldn’t think, she said, your church would go along with those ideas.

He laughed, pleased. No, well. All that is up in the air, now, you know. I’m something of a heresiarch anyway, really. In fact, I’ve recently worked up a new heresy, or refurbished an old one. Would you like to hear it?

If you can promise we won’t be punished for it, Phillippa said. To the north, a vast, curdled darkness was advancing across their path. I mean look at that sky.

It goes like this, he said, crossing one sharp-kneed leg over the other. "I’ve decided that not all men have immortal souls. Immortality is what Adam and Eve forfeited in the garden. From then on it was dust to dust. What Jesus promised to those who believed in him was eternal life—the possibility of not dying eternally. So that the believer, if his faith and hope and charity are strong, creates his own immortality through Jesus—the first immortal man since Adam: the new Adam."

What about the outer darkness, and the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?

"A metaphor for death. I think it’s easier to explain those few references to fires and so on as metaphors for death than to explain all the many references to death as metaphors for eternal punishment. Jesus said, He who believes in me shall not die; that seems clearly to mean that everybody else will."

No hell?

No. A great problem solved there. Those who don’t care about salvation merely go under the ground, utterly extinguished, having failed to accomplish their immortality.

Comforting.

Isn’t it. Also clears up the problems of infant damnation and the Good Pagan. More than that, though: it makes the choice harder. The choice for Jesus. When the alternative doesn’t seem so terrible.

In fact—I’m sorry—preferable. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me.

Well, there you are. Perhaps it isn’t an unalloyed good. Perhaps it’s quite difficult—as difficult as any kind of life.

Dear me.

Maybe some have no choice. The God-possessed, the saintly. He had grown more still, more inward. She wondered if he were still joking. In fact, I would think the population of heaven would be small.

Phillippa thought of medieval pictures of the court of heaven, the winged saints in rows intended to suggest great numbers but really absurdly few. But that wasn’t the heaven he envisioned, was it? Where ripe fruit never falls. If it were to be a heaven composed of the things one loved most, it would have to include (as far as Phillippa was concerned) change of season, fall of leaves, days like this one, raddled with dark, flying clouds; the flame of swamp maples, going out; April’s green. And yes, for there to be enough of it to go around, perhaps there would need to be only a few to divide it among; the rest of us, mortal, resigning it to them. She thought, suddenly, of an old convertible turning in at the stone gateposts of the long weedy drive leading up to the farm.

Who could that be? her mother said. No one we know.

The car, with orange leaves stuck beneath its windshield wipers, nosed into the drive tentatively, uncertainly.

Just turning around, perhaps, lost, Phillippa said. They sat together on the porch, for it was quite warm in the sun. It was so utterly still and blue that the leaves fell seemingly for no reason, skating with slow agility to the ground. Their clicking fall among the rest was sometimes audible: it was that still.

The car stopped halfway up the drive and a young man got out. He wore a wide fedora—every man did then—and smoked a long, straight pipe. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks, looking at the house, though not, it seemed, at them. When at last he began to walk toward them, he did so not purposefully, nor did he hail them; he might have been arriving at a deserted house, or a house of his own. When at last he did greet them, it was with a kind of lazy familiarity. He wasn’t a Vermonter, by his voice.

He had been told, he said, in the village, that the ladies were thinking of selling. He was in the market for just such a place; a writer, he needed someplace quiet to work. Were they in fact selling? Might he see the place?

It had been that very week that Phillippa and her mother had come to see that another summer in this house wasn’t possible. The people in the village had, apparently, come to the same conclusion; not surprising, really, but a little forward of them to put it up for sale without asking. Well, her look asked her mother, here he was: why not show him around?

It’s kind of a rambling old place, she said as they went in